He Cervantes Institute already has its magic figure: the number of people who speak Spanish around the world exceeds 600 million (600,607,806 people), according to the 2024 yearbook. “We can be happy about the cultural strength of Spanish in the world,” he said. Luis García Monterodirector of the Cervantes Institute, who highlighted that Spanish “is a reference in the world for democratic values and commitment to understanding in the face of reactionary thinking and violence.” It is the first time in history that the 600 million mark has been exceeded, adding native speakers (498 million) and non-native speakers, which keeps Spanish as the second mother tongue in the world after Mandarin Chinese, the fourth if all levels are included. of knowledge.
These figures, like all, depend on the kitchen. Another report published this week reduces those 600 million speakers to 591. The author of this study, ‘Spanish: a living language 2024’, is David Fernández Vítores, the same researcher who had been preparing the Cervantes report for the last fifteen years. On this occasion, after separating itself from the government agency, it publishes it with a less accommodating cuisine that “helps consolidate some critical approaches to its measurement that only appeared timidly in previous editions.”
Fernández Vítores has taken into account the latest studies from Eurostat and the Pew Research Center and excludes students from the global calculation, which, in his opinion, incurs double counting. That’s why Cervantes gets 600 million and he gets 591; While the official study speaks of 24.2 million “Spanish language learners”, the alternative report reduces the “group of foreign language learners not included in the limited competence group” to 8.9 million. “The introduction of small changes in appreciation has made it possible to more accurately reflect the new quantitative reality,” explains the researcher.
Questioned about this divergence in methodology, García Montero stated that Cervantes has maintained the line of work of recent times. This year’s report has led Francisco Morenodirector of the Global Observatory of Spanish and responsible for the institute’s studies before Fernández Vítores. “Later Francisco Moreno went to the Spanish Observatory at Harvard and the Ibero-American Observatory in Heidelberg, and then he entrusted one of his disciples, Professor Fernández Vítores, with the development of the study,” said García Montero. Upon his return, Fernández Vítores has chosen to continue reporting on his own, but “that has not meant a break,” Cervantes assures. The working mechanisms of the institute remain the same.
The truth is that there are differences between both reports, and not only in the counting of speakers. The study ‘Spanish: a living language 2024’, by Fernández Vítores, also remembers that over the years the weight of Spanish will decrease. The peak will be reached in 2066, the year in which it will exceed 682 million speakers, and from then on a gradual decline will begin until the end of the century, “only partially compensated by the increase in non-native Spanish speakers in the US.” .». In other words: “If in the last 75 years the Spanish-speaking community increased by 285 percent, in the next 75 years it will only grow by 10 percent.” In 2100 only 6.3 percent of the world’s population will be able to communicate in Spanish; now it is 7.3 percent (or 7.5, according to Cervantes).
The reasons for this hole have not changed much. There is a first issue: demographics. The relative weight of the Spanish-speaking community will decline in the coming decades, and its place will be taken by other regions such as sub-Saharan Africa or central and southern Asia. There France is becoming strong. The other reason is related to the offer of Spanish as a second language in the educational system. In the US, the language is losing steam in higher education, which could be replicated at other educational levels, and the erratic foreign policy with Spanish in Brazil has led to a loss of more than a million students since 2017. “We are doing everything possible to respond to the demands for teaching Spanish and to support the consolidation of Spanish as a regulated language in school studies,” argued García Montero, who attributed the president’s Lula has not managed to reestablish the offer of Spanish as a second language in educational centers.
The Cervantes report, of 652 pages, prefers to focus on other issues related to culture, such as the weight of language in fiction series. According to the data provided, Spain is the fifth producer of series among the 100 most viewed on Netflix in the world and is, together with the United Kingdom, the largest producer of fiction series in Europe. There is another section dedicated to music: Cervantes notes that about a quarter of the songs on the 2023 charts on portals such as YouTube or Spotify used Spanish; and Spanish music consumption has increased 3.8 percent. According to Eduardo Vinuelaprofessor of Art History and Musicology at the University of Oviedo, since 2017, after the ‘Despacito’ effect (due to the song by Luis Fonsi), digital consumption of music in Spanish has grown. The successes of Spanish songs in the world are no longer exceptional: “It is consolidating itself as a trend that will most likely continue in the coming years.”
The institute directed by García Montero also highlights that the Spanish language is in sixth place in the world for languages translated into others in the field of literature. Of course, among the fifty most translated authors worldwide, only one Spanish-speaking author appears, Gabriel García Márquez, in 49th place.
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